Swimming With Sharks

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Swimming With Sharks

How do you make $1.7 billion at the box office? Introduce the world to digital animation and never stop upping the ante. That's what Pixar has done since 1995 with its CG toys, insects, and monsters. Now the company aims to hook that elusive Oscar for Best Animated Feature with the aquatic adventure Finding Nemo, which Disney releases May 30. To get their feet wet, the film's crew became licensed scuba divers, installed an aquarium in the office, and watched hours of The Blue Planet. After all, Nemo needs to make a splash. Longtime competitor PDI/DreamWorks is hot on the animation house's tail fin with Sharkslayer, an underwater mob movie. Here's how Pixar is staving off the "Shrekking of America."

An Animation Timeline

Toy Story (1995)Pixar made the world's first all-CG feature. Two apps replaced tedious hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animation: RenderMan spat out each of the movie's 1,560 shots, and Menv endowed 3-D characters with articulation controls.

A Bug's Life (1998)With PDI/DreamWorks' Antz due the same year, Pixar had to get even more real. The tech coup: subdivisional surfacing, a modeling method that flexibly represents points in space. It gave Flik the ant 320 facial controls, more than twice that of Toy Story's Woody.

Toy Story 2 (1999)Pixar mostly relied on old tricks to crank out this sequel, which had an incredibly short nine-month production cycle.

Monsters, Inc. (2001)The studio's secret weapon: the physics algorithms of FizT, which allowed the 3 million hairs in Sulley's blue coat to correspond with the character's movement. Plus, Pixar doubled its computing power from Toy Story 2, to 2.5 million RenderMarks.

Finding Nemo (2003)The Little Mermaid was a fingerling compared with Nemo. This underwater world undulates in response to currents, captures the flapping of fish, and deftly reproduces the ocean's murk. To get this look, the Pixar brain trust built a water simulator and a tool that lays out three-dimensional paths for the fish to follow.